Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Memorial to pre-Reformation shrines

icn Plans for a memorial to the medieval shrines destroyed during the Reformation, were unveiled yesterday at Charterhouse.The sculpture by Paul Day, commissioned by the Art and Reconciliation Trust, (ART) will be placed close to the site of Chelsea Manor, once home of St Thomas More and his family. After More was executed for his faith in 1535, his house was given to the Lord Chamberlain, Sir William Sandys. In 1538 Sir Thomas Cromwell moved there in order to avoid the plague that was raging in central London. Cromwell was masterminding the dissolution of the monasteries and destruction of monastic churches and shrines at that time. In order to make sure that all the looted statues were destroyed, Cromwell ordered that they should all be brought to Chelsea Manor and burnt in a huge bonfire that he could personally witness. Among the statues lost was Our Lady of Walsingham, a shrine which ranked fourth after Rome. Jerusalem and Compostella, the Black Madonna of Willesden and Our Lady of Grace of Ipswich.

4 comments:

Recusant
said...

At last the full picture, starting with Eamonn Duffy's, The Stripping of the Altars, of the destruction that was the Reformation is beginning to emerge. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell really initiated a Year Zero in this country.

It is a slow drip drip process after five hundred years of Protestant propaganda and distortion, but the truth is slowly dawning that it was, even excluding the religious dimension, a cultural social and economic disaster of unimaginable proportions.

There is an excellent book on the subject of the Reformation by William Cobbett called "A history of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland" which all should read, it was written in 1824-1827 so the truth about the reformation has been available to historians for quite a long time(Cobbett was a protestant by the way), it was banned in this country I believe.

'This is all very nice but when are we going to ask for our Cathedrals back, we should start with Durham Cathedral because that's were I live :D'

And I went to University. Read Bede's life of St Cuthbert in the Summer and you get a picture of the amazing Catholic life there. St Wilfrid was pretty amazing too. Pilgrimages to Rome were not to be undertaken lightly in those days.

Ubi Petrus, ibi ecclesia, et ubi ecclesia vita eterna

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